About the planet Kwaide:

As you can see from this plan of the system, Kwaide is the second planet in orbit around the yellow star, Sacras.

Wheras Coriolis is lush and green and warm and filled with abundant plant and animal life, Kwaide is just that much further away from its sun to make it cold, inhospitable, barren and uncomfortable. It is renowned for its icy cold winds, which they say can kill a person.

The Elders live in the flatlands, around the centre and south of the planet, and they banish the untouchables they have no use for to the uninhabitable zone, to the north of the planet. This is an area dominated by jagged mountains always capped in ice, peaks where blizzards are so common that even the endemic warthogs cannot venture up them. Some of the waterfalls are so rich in deposits that they petrify anything left hanging in them for a long time.

The main Elder city is Benefice, where millions of people live on top of each other, and in generally squalid conditions, which has resulted in the effluent conduits, no-go areas where many no-names work and die.

Although water is plentiful in the north, not much else is. Eking out a living there is a gruelling task, taking all day every day. Six should know. It is what he had to do for years as he tried to protect his sisters.

The only assets that Kwaide has is its abundant deposits of rexelene, which is used all over the system. It is mined mainly around the city of Rexel, although there are other deposits on the planet. The Elders had imported huge juggernauts to move the rexelene to the space port, where the Sellites took charge of it for exportation.

The very northern part of Kwaide is where the characters in this book set up camp. They have no materials to build any complicated dwellings so the main cabins are made of wooden slats which don't do a very good job at keeping the chilling wind out!